Kiki KogelnikI have seen the future!

Rockets, cannons, body fragments, collages, stencils, spray paints, crazy colours – these characterise the pictorial worlds of Kiki Kogelnik, born in Graz in 1935. Having grown up in Carinthia, she was drawn to the USA in 1961 after her years at the academy in Vienna, settling in New York around 1962. It is thus no accident that her works reflect something of the canon of East Coast Pop practised by her male colleagues of the time. Yet in contrast to their play with materials or their pronounced fetishism of brands, the young Austrian had made the expansion of consciousness her cause and from the very beginning took a highly critical view of the connection within Pop between a love of technology and a mentality of conquest. This can be seen in her pictures, which may be read either as detached statements or as a seemingly naive eyewitness account of the euphoria of the 1960s. The magic word for Kiki Kogelnik’s divergence in both form and content is utopia; she is interested in transformations, in the overcoming of space and time, and always regarded the present as the beginning of a better future. Small wonder that in the 1970s she increasingly took up the subject of Women’s Lib and from then on concerned herself with questions of gender. The retrospective at the Kunstverein in Hamburg and the elaborately designed and printed catalogue bear eloquent witness to all these stages in the work of an unusual artist; Kiki Kogelnik died in Vienna in 1997.

Exhibition:
Kunstverein in Hamburg, 15/9 – 30/12/2012